Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The self-breaking mechanism of atomic scale Au nanocontacts

Tomoka Nakazumi, Yasuo Wada and Manabu Kiguchi



We have investigated the self-breaking mechanism of atomic scale Au nanocontacts at room temperature in air. In the conductance traces, we frequently observed traces showing both a 1 G 0 (2 e 2 / h ) and 3 G 0 plateaux, or only a 2 G 0 plateau in the conductance regime below 3 G 0 . The statistical analysis showed a negative correlation between the appearance of 1 G 0 and 2 G 0 peaks, and a positive correlation between 1 G 0 and 3 G 0 peaks. This conductance behavior suggested that the symmetric triple atomic rows changed into a symmetric single row, while the asymmetric double rows broke without changing into a symmetric single row. The regular self-breaking process can be explained by the breaking of the thermodynamically stable Au nanocontacts which were formed during the self-breaking of the contacts.



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